Nano-shaped iPod remote and lamp-like speaker

Japan's iPod accessories you'll probably never see

Shares

We often come across Japanese gadgets that won't make it to the West, but bring them to you anyway just for fun. Two such gems are iPod accessories from Radius and Maxell Japan.

First up, ¥5,000 (£24) will land you Radius's in-line remote control for any iPod with a dock connector that looks suspiciously like an iPod nano itself. The radRemote Radio handles all the remote-controlling expected of it and includes - bet you guessed - an FM radio.

Time sensitive

The radio can hold five presets, auto-scans between 76MHz and 90MHz and the whole shebang weighs just 21g. If you're lucky, you might find it on import websites, but watch out for the FM range restriction.

Meanwhile, Maxell has been showing off an iPod speaker dock that looks like an old-fashioned bureau lamp. The ¥25,000 (£120) Time Domain Speaker may have the most pretentious name ever, but Maxell claims the two 5W speakers it holds offer far better sound than similar-sized setups.

The system can charge a docked iPod and includes a remote control, but it can't connect to a PC for syncing with iTunes. As for the name, Maxell says its circuitry does a near-perfect job of reproducing the "temporal process of a sound from start to finish." Whatever that means.